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Learning Education

Earlier this fall, I lotteried for  USW35, "Dilemmas of Equity and Excellence in American K-12 Education". But, like 70% of those who tried to get a seat, I was rejected. So, instead, I'm taking a math course in Functional Analysis (Math 114). It satisfies my Analysis requirement for my joint CS/Math concentration. So there's that.

There's also the fact that professor Lurie has taught me more about how to teach at OGPS than I imagine "Equity and Excellence" ever could. (Aside: In no way do I mean this as a slight against Prof. Merseth. I'm sure that her class is fantastic. But the impression I got from shopping week was that it's a very academic treatment of the education problem in our country, and not "Here's how to teach a kid to program a computer for the first time.")

Now, Jacob Lurie is a frighteningly intelligent man. His undergraduate thesis, for example, contains some words that I know.

My critical reading of "On Simply Laced Lie Algebras and their Miniscule Representations" by J. Lurie, 2000

It also won a first place in the American Mathematical Society's Morgan Prize "for superior mathematical research by an undergraduate student". And he earned a full professorship from Harvard at age 31. So there's that.

He's got a fascinating lecture style. At the beginning of class, he picks a point on the ceiling, and proceeds to deliver the entire hour-long lecture at it. (Quoth Nick Watters: "You

Harvard owns a petting zoo.

In the grand scheme of things, this is not exceptionally surprising. Harvard also owns such disparate objects as a hundred-year-old printing press, a forest in central Mass, and a fleet of Harvard-insignia waffle irons.

In Harvardese, "Veritaffle". You can't make this stuff up.

I don't know how long the zoo has been Harvard's; at least, I remember the bunnies being used to promote Leverett House (whose mascot is a hare) on housing day in March, and the full zoo making an appearance at Eliot House's welcome-back barbecue in September. Nowadays, it's become a weekly fixture in front of the Science Center on Thursday afternoons. To paraphrase one of my professors: "There's no more relaxing way to spend 20 minutes on a Thursday afternoon."

Particularly in need of quick relaxation after Math 131, I made my own stop by the petting zoo. At that point, they were just setting up, and the bunny pen was surrounded by people standing around and looking at -- but not touching the bunnies. No one wanted to be the first one to get down on their hands and knees and pet one.

Having no such reservations, I knelt down and lifted out one of the longhairs (being careful, of course, to support the spine and hindquarters -- I owned a rabbit for many years back home in Maryland). Someone behind my asked "Oh, you can do that? Is it going to bite me?"

Over my shoulder to the woman I couldn't see (I didn't want to turn around with a small rabbit on my lap...), I said "Sure, just keep one hand under his butt,

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"Make someone's day better!"

...was my parting words to a friend today, as she left for her afternoon shift at the Science Center IT help desk. I meant them sarcastically. Everyone knows that IT help is useless, and that the people who go to the help desk with problems will never find help in this world or the next. (I may or may not still be being sarcastic, and should probably mention it before aforementioned friend murders me in my sleep...)

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But it got me thinking. What am I doing with my days to make (other) people's days better? What is the marginal happiness that results from an hour of my time spent working on heterogeneous-source, free-text medical data mining? (For those of you who don't know, MDM was my summer research, and it's stuck around as a part-time thing I do sometimes during term-time.) What's the absolute utility of one hour spent ballroom dancing? Teaching at OGPS? Giving private tours of Harvard? Blogging? How about my CS degree? What's that worth to me? What's it worth to the world?

I don't have answers right now, but it seems like the matter is worth a good deal of thought. After all, it might be that the Operating Systems course I'm taking currently is going to change the world by giving me the tools to conduct serious academic research, get me a foot in the door of the Next Big Thing, and give me the leverage to change the course of the future. Or maybe I'll just never touch systems research again, and it's not worth my time to torpedo my GPA with a graduate-level course outside

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I had a surreal moment today. At about 8pm, and OGPS janitor walked in to find me still in the classroom, and asked "Aren’t you too old to be playing with Legos?"

You see, I was busy finishing the FLL game board models (that is, obstacles and scoring objects for the FLL Robot Game) and was completely engrossed in constructing a six-inch-long truck. Now, there are a few answers I could have given:

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No, I’m not too old. No one’s too old.

I was, after all, completely relaxed for the first time in several days. Though I’ve not had a serious Lego project for years, I had managed to slip back into the flow of pieces fitting together the way they should, and the way I knew they were going to.

Incidentally, I’d encountered the same nostalgia earlier in the day, when I was preparing a few demo robot routines for our "Intro to Programming" lesson. I had had my father ship to me the bulk of my family’s FLL collection, and had unpacked the Chocobots '08 competition bot (still in pristine condition) to use for the demo. Now there was a beautiful design. Our team really knew how to build by the end there, and our final season’s robot was compact, robust, versatile, and capable of attempting every mission on the board that year, if I recall correctly. We weren’t winning, but we were being clever, and doing it in style.

I may be too old by far to be an FLL competitor, but I haven’t fallen out of love with problem-solving with my

The other advantage we have over the Chocobots (Columbia-Howard County Robotics) circa 2006 is we've got a coach who understands the FLL competition very well. We, the coaches, can do intelligent things like leverage the mission-driven nature of the FLL game to organize our classroom activities sensibly, nudge our team members down paths that we (I) expect to pay off, based on past experiences ("How about tackling a shorter mission first, for easy points?"). In short, we intend give our kids the best experience we can by being prepared.

This, on review, is extremely unfair to the former Chocobots coaches. They (that is, my father, and the father of another of the team's founding members) gave new meaning to the word prepared. For a pair that knew nothing of FLL before the team's founding, they did their research fast, and wrote lesson plans, tracked popular strategies published online, built demo models and prototypes (which were promptly disassembled after team critique and discussion), planned and executed field trips, brought in special speakers, built game boards, designed logos, and tracked down software, kits, and parts.

The one thing they didn't do for us was the work. FLL, of course, is about kids' efforts, not coaches' contributions. And

Earlier today, I realized that I was confused about something. (And then mentally told myself: "I realize that I am confused.", so I didn't immediately forget about it, and focus on something unimportant, like the uncountability of the Cantor Set.) My train of thought went something like:

Man, I can't wait to get lunch.

It's a shame that I can't just eat at Annenberg [freshman dining hall]. But at least the food is better in Eliot [my upperclassman house].

Actually, when I get home, what if I just take a nap instead? I'm not exceptionally hungry, and dining hall food is only mediocre at best.

But food is important! More important to you than any other hedonic pleasure, if your blog posts are to be believed...

So why don't you buy better food?

I realize that I am confused.

A fuller explanation requires a little background. I spent a significant amount of time this summer exploring ways to make my life more efficient. Polyphasic sleep was one of those, but even outside of that, my summer roommate and I spent a great deal of time discussing values, terminal goals, and effective operating modes. (For an example of what I mean, he's written up an introspective post on his life goals here. Maybe someday I'll have the free time to do something similar.)

One of the conversations we had was about food, and in particular, Soylent. For those of you not in-the-know on everything crazy, "Soylent" (not to be confused with Soylent Green) is one man's homemade attempt to create an all-in-one foodstuff-drink that includes everything the body needs -- and nothing that the soul desires. (I've

Today, I was late getting out of OS class, so I missed the 2:53 1 bus to Roxbury. And so I had to bike for about half an hour (I passed two 1 busses on my way, though -- never change, Boston) to get to Orchard Gardens Pilot School (hereafter 'OGPS' or 'OG').

I -- and the incredibly multitalented Diane Yang -- are volunteering with the nonprofit Citizen Schools to run an afterschool Lego Robotics team for the OGPS 6th grade. We'll be helping them to plan, design, build, and program a Lego Mindstorms robot to compete in the FIRST Lego League Challenge (FIRST, here is a forced backronym, not an adjective).

It should be an enormous amount of fun. I'm also incredibly scared.

You see, when I competed in FLL (three seasons, 2006-2008), I was coming from five weeks of summer camp where I had learned -- in some exhaustive detail -- the ins and outs of the Mindstorms RCX platform. (NXT is a definite upgrade hardware-wise, but the software level is basically the same.) The team of friends that I assembled included many, many good-at-math types who had been working with computers, Legos, and their intersection from young ages. And since meetings were at my house, my brother and I effectively lived with the robot, game